Report: iOS 6 Maps is data-efficient compared to predecessor

The new Maps app uses 80% less data in standard view, 50% less in satellite.

In the face of negative press about iOS 6's new Maps app, a bit of detective work by mobile app producer Onavo has unearthed a positive tidbit of news. The company says that iOS 6's Maps app uses considerably less data than its Google-powered predecessor—in fact, Onavo claims the much-maligned Apple Maps is "up to five times more efficient" than the previous incarnation.

The increase in efficiency appears to come primarily from Apple's reliance on vector graphics in "Standard" view, rather than a discrete set of tiled bitmaps like Google Maps. A bitmap is an actual image file with a native resolution and a fixed number of pixels; when zoomed in, it gets blurry or pixelated because new details cannot be created. A map with multiple zoom levels must have one set of bitmaps for each individual zoom level, which for a very large data set like Google Maps can mean lots and lots of data. Vector graphics, though, are based on mathematically defined curves and lines. They stay sharp at any zoom level, because a vector curve can be re-calculated and re-drawn as needed.

When you zoom in and out with Google Maps, even in standard view, new tiles are downloaded and displayed at each zoom level. Apple Maps on iOS 6, though, doesn't have to pull an entire new set of tiles down—it just re-draws the curves and lines as needed for the new zoom level, remaining sharp and crisp. Onavo's tests indicate that an average download for a Google Maps zoom was about 1.3MB, whereas the same operation with iOS 6's Apple Maps was only 271KB.

Onavo indicates that the data savings extends to satellite view as well, with iOS 6 showing about a 50 percent reduction in bandwidth over Google Maps, though the company doesn't speculate as to why. It's likely that iOS 6 uses a level of image compression tailored for display on iPhone "retina" screens; if so, this is another area where Apple's notoriously tight control of the end-to-end ecosystem can eke out benefits that more open systems like Android can't match.

For Wi-Fi users, the data savings are nice, but not terribly important, since a quick Wi-Fi network will deliver a megabyte in about an eyeblink's time. The reduction in data becomes very important, though, for cellular users. The smaller size is nice from a speed standpoint for folks in 3G (or, heaven forbid, EDGE) areas, but the real bonus is in shaving megabytes off of the per-month cellular data usage counter. If you're a heavy user of your phone's mapping application, an 80% reduction in the amount of data it uses could free up a whole lot of megabytes for other things.

If Apple had let Google throw in the features they wanted, users probably would have had vector based maps a long time ago.

Also, when the heck did Google Maps get the ability to go through floors of a building?! I was just toying around with Maps on my N7 for vector fun and zoomed in on the City Hall building in Boston that gave me the numbers 1-9 on the side. As I clicked each one a floor dropped on top of the building and new data was shown on it.

It is Apple Maps and has always been Apple Maps... Google Maps implies an application created by Google... IE android Google Maps, or Web Google Maps. iOS has never had Google Maps, only map data provided by Google.

Bitmap loading when scrolling is one of my main complaints about Google Maps, so if Apple can solve the invalid data problem, its more efficient presentation will make for a better overall experience while roaming on the various cellular networks.

I was out in the middle of nowhere this weekend and the maps were dead on accurate matching what the NAV unit in my car was showing. So while some data is screwy and will get fixed, at least for my usage this weekend, there were no issues at all.

And at times I was in EDGE land and even still the maps were loading quickly.

if so, this is another area where Apple's notoriously tight control of the end-to-end ecosystem can eke out benefits that more open systems like Android can't match.

I think you're jumping to conclusions here, particularly without any comparison to Android devices. The fact is that the iOS Google Maps app has been significantly neglected over the years, and is underdeveloped compared to what exists on Android. To give one major, article-related example, Google Maps on Android introduced vector graphics with version 5 back in 2010. Comparing the old iOS Google Maps app to the new iOS Apple Maps app by itself doesn't tell you anything on the state of Google Maps on any other platform. It certainly is not a demonstration of control vs open either.

This is an odd statement. While it's possible Apple may be going for lower quality images to increase compression, they've also got much more powerful CPUs to work with now. They could taking advantage of that to use a higher quality compression system as well, which would be much more interesting.

Also, when the heck did Google Maps get the ability to go through floors of a building?!

It appears that the effort started around 2009 with the opening of the "Building Maker" program enabling crowdsourcing of 3D building details.

Just tried it on my desktop, but I'm not sure if it's available in the browser experience. Both in standard and the WebGL versions I don't see any way to activate it. Pretty neat in the app though.

Yup. If it took Google 3 years to develop enough data for this feature to be meaningful, I dread having to use Apple iMaps for the next few years if I cannot figure out how to keep Apple from forcing me to upgrade from iOS 5 on my 4S.

I read this on another site yesterday, and many commenters were pointing out that this is valid only for iOS5 Google Maps vs. iOS6 Maps, since Google Maps for Android already uses vector graphics and has used it for some time. Can you confirm?

Another relevant point is that, regardless of data efficiency, Google Maps for Android allows you to cache huge maps for offline use, so you can use GPS guidance even without data coverage or with data turned off.

I like the vector approach, though I wonder if that has an impact on accuracy (not the accuracy you are thinking of.) How do they maintain changes and does that make it easier or harder to implement map changes? As roads and locations change, does the vector approach make them slower to appear or faster?

On the Satellite view, I've found the Apple Satellite views to be blurry compared to comparable Google Maps imaging. Not sure if the compression has something to do with that but it doesn't look great when you zoom in.

How would image compression be "tailored" or a higher res screen in such a way as to save more data magically? You either compress images more or less with lossy compression. There's nothing magical about the retina display other than it being high-resolution. Certainly if you want things to look better at higher resolution, you'd use less compression, with bigger files?

Most tests I've seen show Apple's Maps to be MORE accurate than their iOS 5 counterparts, but be less likely to "guess" (sometimes correctly) on limited data. Thus, the iOS 6 maps is more likely to produce technically accurate but less helpful results, while iOS 5 is more likely to lead you astray, but always has an opinion.

The *REAL* benefit of vector maps on wireless, though, is the same few megabytes of on-phone cached maps will get you vast amounts of area coverage. If you lose your signal, you're probably going to navigate 100 miles before you run off the edge of the map. With Google it was more like 1 mile.

Most tests I've seen show Apple's Maps to be MORE accurate than their iOS 5 counterparts, but be less likely to "guess" (sometimes correctly) on limited data. Thus, the iOS 6 maps is more likely to produce technically accurate but less helpful results, while iOS 5 is more likely to lead you astray, but always has an opinion.

The *REAL* benefit of vector maps on wireless, though, is the same few megabytes of on-phone cached maps will get you vast amounts of area coverage. If you lose your signal, you're probably going to navigate 100 miles before you run off the edge of the map. With Google it was more like 1 mile.

I was out in the middle of nowhere this weekend and the maps were dead on accurate matching what the NAV unit in my car was showing. So while some data is screwy and will get fixed, at least for my usage this weekend, there were no issues at all.

And at times I was in EDGE land and even still the maps were loading quickly.

Others, including Consumer Reports, have come to the same conclusion.

Consumer Reports wrote:

having more thoroughly tested Apple Maps alongside a Samsung Galaxy S3 running Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with Google Maps, we have a more favorable opinion--certainly more favorable than comments and articles that we've been reading online.

Anandtech also tested Apple Maps and Google Maps giving directions side by side in real world driving and found no problems. They uploaded the test to Youtube and you can watch them doing their thing yourself.

It's amazing to me that some people are SO partisan in their view of the world that they can't see that many things such as this are tradeoffs. The people who are essentially saying, "Yeah, well, it doesn't matter because the information is all wrong," are trying to trivialize the interesting and useful technical innovations that Apple is bringing to its maps. And the implication is that the old map data (from Google) was perfect. That's insane. I've used iOS maps ever since the first iPhone, and it hasn't been uncommon for information on the maps to be incorrect. The new map dataset might be worse in certain geographical areas, but it hasn't really been any different in my own usage so far. (And it's much better than the old dataset in certain parts of the world.)

Anyone who argues that iOS (or any product) doesn't have flaws is blinding himself to facts. But anyone who says that the new iOS maps are awful and the old ones (from Google) were perfect is just as blind, but in a different way. Nothing is perfect. When things change, we get a different set of tradeoffs. Apple made some tradeoffs to be able to give customers things that they never would have been able to deliver if they'd continued to partner with Google on this (because Google had its own self-interest in the matter). In the meantime, map accuracy has dropped marginally in some locations. The dataset will catch up with the Google map dataset over time, and the technical and feature changes that some people are so eager to pooh-pooh right now will be seen as more important.

In other words, people are unfair based on their own biases AND they are incredibly short-sighted.

The people who are essentially saying, "Yeah, well, it doesn't matter because the information is all wrong," are trying to trivialize the interesting and useful technical innovations that Apple is bringing to its maps.

But, here's the problem: "vector maps on a phone" is not an Apple innovation. What, exactly, are the interesting and useful technical innovations that have been brought? Apple is the 800-lb gorilla here, they don't get an achievement award for bringing their maps app closer to feature parity with Google and Nokia.

How would image compression be "tailored" or a higher res screen in such a way as to save more data magically? You either compress images more or less with lossy compression. There's nothing magical about the retina display other than it being high-resolution. Certainly if you want things to look better at higher resolution, you'd use less compression, with bigger files?

I agree that it was an odd thing to say. Also, while it seems most likely that Apple simply dropped the quality with the same system, I really hope someone digs into Apple Maps a bit to find out. The much technically cooler possibility is that they've switched to using an entirely different codec like H.264. JPEG and PNG are ubiquitous, but they're also 20 and 16 years old respectively and nearly anything modern can do much, much better. Of course on the general web, ubiquitousness and installed base, "good enough" counts for a lot. However, in a specific application a developer doesn't need to worry about that, and the bandwidth savings are significant. If Apple has chosen to use something else (and H.264 seems the most likely since they've got hardware and licensing for it anyway) that'd be interesting.

Yes, in a comparison between two iOS apps, Android should be mentioned.

That doesn't seem completely unreasonable given that the wording of the article gives one the impression that any version of Google Maps performs equally badly regardless of platform, which isn't even remotely the case.

Yup. If it took Google 3 years to develop enough data for this feature to be meaningful, I dread having to use Apple iMaps for the next few years if I cannot figure out how to keep Apple from forcing me to upgrade from iOS 5 on my 4S.

Lee Hutchinson / Lee is the Senior Reviews Editor at Ars and is responsible for the product news and reviews section. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX.